Africa

We all know that institutions matter for development. A really nice new paper by Daron Acemoglu, Tristan Reed and James Robinson shows us how political competition affects a wide range of development outcomes.

Today I don't want to rehash the discussion of why do cash transfers (a recent discussion by some colleagues is here) or their myriad impacts (including among the legions, Berk's discussion here, David's here) but rather focus on one particular project. This pr

Today I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a new initiative that the Africa Region and the Research Group at the World Bank are launching today. The idea here is that we don't know enough about how to effectively address the underlying causes of gender inequality. Let me start by explaining what I mean by underlying causes. Take the case of female farmers. There is a lot of literature out there which shows that women have lower agricultural yields than men. And some of it shows that this is because women have lo

When I drop my kids off at daycare, it does occasionally occur to me: what am I doing to them? (This thought is particularly acute when they wrap themselves around my legs). Last year, 3ie put out a systematic review on the impact of daycare programs. The conclusions are instructive:

So I have blogged in the past about the potential and the use of gender disaggregated data, but my work this past week in Ghana made me realize (again and in new ways) how complicated it can get in practice.